The antinomy of accountability

Accountability is stressed as being a core element of new forms of governance. It should help preserve what keeps society together, as state or community-centred relationships of responsibility lose relevance. Yet this purpose may be hindered by the contractualization of social relations. Trust, legitimacy, solidarity and other social goods increasingly depend on the ability of contractual arrangements to replace traditional forms of vertical and horizontal answerability. The problem is, however, that the logic of contract is intrinsically self-referential, preventing any account to and for whatever lies outside the world produced by the contract itself. A thorough elaboration of this argument would extend far beyond the limits of this chapter. In the following discussion, I use a few concepts drawn from governance studies, political philosophy and social theory, and my empirical references focus primarily on the environmental field. I do not pretend to advance any definitive statement, therefore – merely to outline what seems to me to be a major issue. The first section addresses the problem of self-reference by examining the last wave of contractual arrangements in environmental governance. I then elaborate on the notion of the public as a core element of accountability and discuss in greater detail the self-referential structure of contract and its implications. Finally I compare two ways of coping with the antinomy of accountability: celebrating self-reference and dealing with alterity.